Dean, who was sweeping the floor, looked surprised by the praise, but gave Gabe a fist bump, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
Gabe and Chaska sat at one of the tables and dug in. Mountain air had a way of making a person hungry, at least in Gabe’s experience.
Alissa bounded up to him, a happy smile on her face. “Mama says we can stay a while longer. Can we, Daddy?”
“Are you having a good time?”
She nodded, her face as bright as the sun. “I’ve been playing horses around the tipi. It’s not like ahogaan, but I like it.”
Kat spoke almost exclusively Diné to the kids, while Gabe spoke English. Both Alissa and Nakai were more or less bilingual at this point and spent a few months each year at their grandmother’s home in Kaibito on the Navajo reservation.
Kat walked up, Noelle on her hip, Nakai hopping along a few feet behind her. “We can stay here while you go into town to tell them about the phone lines—unless you had planned on going straight home from Scarlet Springs.”
“If the kids want to keep playing, I don’t mind coming back for you.”
Alissa jumped up and down and then ran out of the Dining Hall with her little brother, the two of them chattering to each other in Diné, Kat watching, a smile on her face.
Gabe took Noelle and fed her bits of his watermelon while Kat went to the restroom. By the time Kat returned, he was ready to head into town.
He sought out Naomi. “I’m supposed to check on a cake at Food Mart and then let someone know that the phone line is dead.”
Naomi nodded. “If you can bring back a few ten-pound bags of ice that would be great, too. The ice maker just quit working.”
“You got it.”
He walked to his vehicle, caught the scent of smoke on the breeze, and wondered who’d been stupid enough to ignore the county-wide fire ban to start a campfire. He’d been a ranger for too many years not to feel irritated by this. Leave it to idiots to put other people’s lives and property at risk.
He drove out of the canyon toward the dirt road that led to the highway. It was a thirty- or forty-minute drive to Scarlet, so he turned the radio to a classic rock station, singing along to Boston. After about ten minutes, he spotted an old spruce that had fallen and taken the phone lines down with it.
Well, shit.
That would take a while to repair.
As he rounded the next bend, a herd of elk bolted across the road in front of him, running as if spooked, forcing him to slam on his brakes.
Strange.
It wasn’t like them to be active during the heat of the day.
He watched them pass then drove on until he came around another bend.
A sheriff’s vehicle raced toward him, overhead lights flashing.
He pulled over, giving the officer room to pass on the narrow road.
To his surprise, the vehicle stopped.
A deputy rolled down the window, and he recognized Deputy Marcs. “We’ve got an active crown fire burning west of town. There’s a mandatory evacuation in place for this area. You can’t be here.”
Gabe’s heart gave a hard knock. “Mandatory evacuation?”
He had worked as a park ranger for years. He knew what an active crown fire could do. He needed to get back to the camp and warn Chaska, Naomi, and the others. “I just came from Camp Mato Sapa. Nobody told us about this.”
“Don’t tell me you guys didn’t get the reverse 911 calls.”
“We didn’t. The phone lines are dead about a half mile up the road—a fallen tree branch. That’s why I’m coming into town—to let people know the camp has no phone service.”
Okay, there was the bit about the cake and the ice, but that didn’t matter now. All that mattered was getting everyone to safety.